LAHORE: A judicial magistrate extended on Friday the physical remand of two prime suspects by four days in an Azeri woman’s gang-rape case.
The two prime suspects, arrested of the three accused in the case, were produced before Judicial Magistrate Azhar Mahmood at the Cantonment Courts following the expiry of their remand period.
The case has been registered with Defence-C police on Sept 26 on the complaint of a 20-year-old Azeri woman, who had travelled to Pakistan for business purposes and was allegedly gang-raped by three men in a rented flat of a private housing society located near Raiwind.
During the hearing on Friday, the investigating officer (IO) told the court that a substantial part of the investigation had been completed, but the police still needed to recover the suspects’ mobile phones.
The IO sought an extension of their physical remand to recover their phones and complete the investigation.
The magistrate accepted his request and extended the suspects’ remand by four days.
The case
Apart from the three prime suspects, the complainant has also accused two women of abetting the crime. One of them is on physical remand with the police while the other is on bail.
On Sept 27, the complainant recorded her statement before Judicial Magistrate Muhammad Sagheer under Section 164 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC).
In her statement, she said she had arrived in Pakistan from Istanbul on Sept 13 and travelled to Lahore after staying in Faisalabad for five days.
She said she had contacted two women to meet her in Lahore and later accompanied one of them to a house in Bahria Town, where she met the other. The group subsequently moved to an apartment, where three men allegedly raped her.
The woman alleged that one of the men locked her in a room and the suspects refused to let her leave unless she drank alcohol with them. She said the men later threw her out of a car at an unknown location, threatened her against approaching the police and took her handbag containing Rs200,000 and two mobile phones.
She also alleged that one of the women had taken Rs20,000 to Rs30,000 from a suspect, while both women were present during the events leading to the alleged assault.
It is the second such case in which a foreign woman has been allegedly gang-raped in Lahore’s Defence-C police station area during the last four months.
In June, two foreign women, nationals of the Netherlands and Venezuela, were allegedly abducted and sexually assaulted in the Defence-C police station area.
According to the FIR, the women were abducted by five suspects, including a close relative of a senior political personality, who demanded ransom and subjected them to sexual assault during their captivity.
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